Welcome to Equalizer 0.5.4, a framework for the development and deployment of
parallel, scalable OpenGL applications. Equalizer 0.5.4 adds support for
automatic load-balancing.

Equalizer 0.5.4 is a developer release, representing a stable snapshot of the
development tree after the 0.5 release. Equalizer 0.5.4 can be retrieved
using:svn co https://equalizer.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/equalizer/tags/release-0.5.4

Features

Equalizer provides the following major features to facilitate the development
and deployment of scalable OpenGL applications. A
detailed feature list can be found on the
Equalizer website.

Runtime Configurability: An Equalizer application can run on any
configuration, from laptops to large scale visualization clusters, without
recompilation. The runtime configuration is externalized from the
application to a systemwide resource server.

Runtime Scalability: An Equalizer application can use multiple
CPU's, GPU's and computers to scale the rendering performance of a single
view.

Distributed Execution: Equalizer applications can be written to
support cluster-based execution. The task of distributing the application
data is facilitated by support for versioned, distributed objects.

Support for Stereo and Immersive Environments: Equalizer supports
both active and passive stereo rendering, as well as the head tracking,
which is required for immersive Virtual Reality installations.

New in this release

The following features, bug fixes and documentation changes where introduced
since the 0.5 release:

Documentation

API Changes

0.5.4:

The eqBase, eqNet and eqServer
namespaces have been renamed to eq::base, eq::net
and eq::server, respectively. Application developers are
encouraged to make the necessary changes, but can
define EQ_USE_DEPRECATED if these changes are not feasible.

Supported Platforms

Equalizer is a cross-platform toolkit, designed to run on any modern operating
system, including all Unix variants and the Windows operating system. A
compatibility matrix can be found on the
Equalizer website. Version 0.5 has been tested on:

Operating System Support

Linux: Ubuntu 6.10 (x64, i386), RHEL4 (x64, i386)

Windows: XP with Visual Studio 2005 (i386, x64) and
Cygwin (i386)

Mac OS X: 10.5 (PowerPC, i386)

Window System Support

X11: Full support for all documented features.

WGL: Full support for all documented features.

AGL: Full support for all documented features.

Documentation

The
Programming
Guide is part of the Equalizer and can be found
online. Equalizer
does not yet have an Users Guide. The shipped
examples provides a reference for developing or porting
applications. The Developer Documentation
on the website provides further design documents for specific features. The
source code is a last resort for information.